A speaker far from home who promises to return to the forests, streams and village music of his native land.
How McKay's move from Jamaica to the United States shapes the poem, and how its sonnet form, repetition and sounds work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'I shall return again; I shall return', 'To laugh and love and watch with wonder-eyes', 'At golden noon the forest fires burn', 'Wafting their blue-black smoke to sapphire skies', 'That bathe the brown blades of the bending grasses', 'realize once more my thousand dreams', 'the fiddle and fife / Of village dances', 'dear delicious tunes', 'the hidden depths of native life', 'To ease my mind of long, long years of pain'.
Form: a Shakespearean sonnet of three quatrains and a couplet; the repeated promise, alliteration and sensory imagery, the future tense, and the final couplet that names his pain.
Context: McKay, born in 1890 in rural Jamaica, who left for the United States in 1912 and met its racism there; a central poet of the Harlem Renaissance, whose collection Harlem Shadows (1922) includes the poem; his use of the sonnet when many poets thought it old-fashioned.
Compares well with: I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud on nature held in memory; Drummer Hodge on home and a land far away; Decomposition on place and belonging; Sonnet 29 as another sonnet of longing.
